Feminist Communities of Practice: Building Stronger Research Coalitions to Counter Antagonism in the Academy

In the face of academic antagonism, this article argues that feminists must build caring and careful communities of practice to sustain ourselves. In it we explore the importance of creating intentional, feminist-oriented spaces of actionable solidarity to protect activists and academics from institutional antagonisms. Through our encounters as researchers working within feminist archives, and as academics who are part of feminist research collectives, we have developed a process for creating provisional solidarities that protect both our persons and our activisms. This process is based on our lived experiences, archival explorations, and social media research that informs our sometimes messy and often nuanced praxes of community-building as a counterpoint to increasing neo-liberal co-option of discourses of solidarity. In this paper we provide some guideposts for how we do our work as a way of inviting further conversation around how to manage the antagonisms we face as feminist scholars.